Standing In the Eye Of The Hurricane, Except It’s a 40 oz Bottle of Hurricane and the Eye Is a Fractured Looking Glass by J.B. Stone

Details of the tragic death of Donovan Butty, the out-of-work trapeze artist living with next-door neighbors Bob and Fiona Tanner since birth, fail to faze the Jeffermans. Fiona Tanner is sure Elaine knows something. Something that could change everything.

Louis Jefferman buys high and sells low

It was the worst day ever, Louis tells his children, Eliza and Isaac, in a series of hastily scribbled sticky notes. But everything is ok now. No one will go without food or clothes this year! Except their half-brother, Rudy, who they have never met and is living in a YMCA somewhere in Cincinnati with his common-law wife, Marlene.

Elaine Jefferman orders a pool (or does she?)

A month after the pool was installed in their backyard as planned, Elaine begins to have doubts. When she confronts the contractor, a man named Reynolds, he also can’t remember how the pool got there. Reynolds checks his records. Nothing. Then Reynolds remembers that the pool was actually supposed to go in the neighbors’ yard. Except it wasn’t a pool the neighbors wanted, it was a flying trapeze. Elaine and Reynolds both stand at the water’s edge wondering what to do next.

The Jeffermans buy their first home

It’s beautiful, Elaine Jefferman tells the real estate agent. Louis Jefferman admires the gently sloping front yard. They sign the papers that afternoon. As soon as the agent leaves, the Jeffermans open a bottle of champagne in the backseat of their Ford Bronco. An eerie silence falls over their celebration as they both realize they forgot to ask the agent about municipal burrowing code.

J.B. Stone

Standing In the Eye Of The Hurricane, Except It’s a 40 oz Bottle of Hurricane and the Eye Is a Fractured Looking Glass

When you’re told of all the things you inherit from your mother. The open-range valley in her smile; the bouquet shaped in her dimples; the streaks of brunette; the light brown in her eyes; the boisterous Brooklyn baritone in her voice; the courage to cry in front of others; like the scenes of Dorothy and Toto’s arrival in the Land of Oz, Judy Garland belting to the score of Over the Rainbow like an angel wrapped in technicolor, raising the ceiling inside your living room as if it were a stretch of clouds /or/ simply skimming through a scrapbook of the dead and a picture of your grandmother draped in sepiotone appears & all the two of you do is weep in each other’s arms knowing at least you’re both still here. No one ever told you how much of her demons you inherit; the pandemonium raging inside her lungs; the underbelly of chaos / turning blood streams into riot scenes; the moments of staring at a bottle with the caution of a lion tamer, knowing any moment your guard is let down, a beast is waiting / grunting / braying / salivating / for the chance to pounce. Yet amid this struggle: still you inherit. Still you inherit her strength; the courage she tucks behind the curtain of her tear ducts, the pain she smothers in a fit of her own laughter; her will; her ability to tell such a vile monster like addiction to fuck off and watch it scurry